NOTE: Due to a technical malfunction, we were unable to produce the usual audio version of today's Green News Report. The GNR was planning to be off next week anyway, so the "vacation" comes a bit earlier, unfortunately, as we wait for replacement equipment to arrive in time for our return on the week of July 17.

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: ExxonMobil's oil spill credibility problem; NEW rules for coal pollution; Night-time solar power in Spain; Jellyfish attack ANOTHER nuclear plant ... PLUS: Final voyage for the U.S. Space Shuttle: America can still do big things ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

Credibility is a precious thing. Oil giant ExxonMobil did not have much to begin with, but it went even deeper into its scarce reserves in the past few days when a company pipeline spilled oil into a river that runs past the homes of about 6,500 people. Wednesday brought another blow: it turns out ExxonMobil needed almost an hour to fully seal the burst pipeline instead of the 30 minutes company president Gary Pruessing had initially said it took.

The details of new EPA regulations, released Thursday, mandate reductions in power-plant emissions. 'Old, decrepit plants' without pollution controls must shut down, which some analysts say just accelerates the inevitable switchover from coal to natural gas.
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Effects of the new rule will sweep across the eastern US, vastly reducing the amount of fine particulate matter that blows from power plant smokestacks in the Midwest toward the east coast, affecting over 240 million Americans along the way, EPA officials said.

Annual benefits of $280 billion from the new regulations - much of it due to reduced health impacts - will easily outweigh the estimated $800 million annual cost of implementation and $1.6 billion per year in utility industry capital investments already under way, the agency reported.

At a time of rising concern over pathogens in produce, Congress is moving to eliminate the only national program that regularly screens U.S. fruits and vegetables for the type of E. coli that recently caused a deadly outbreak in Germany.
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The [GOP-controlled] House last month approved a bill that would end funding for the 10-year-old Microbiological Data Program, which tests about 15,000 annual samples of vulnerable produce such as sprouts, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, cantaloupe and cilantro for pathogens including salmonella and E. coli.

Aid agencies have launched multimillion-pound appeals to address a mounting humanitarian emergency in east Africa, where severe drought and high food prices have left 10 million people requiring assistance.

Tons of imported fish laced with chemicals banned from the U.S. food supply, including carcinogens, are routinely showing up in this country and, state officials say, winding up on American dinner plates.

The Environmental Protection Agency has become a target of House Republicans and of GOP presidential hopefuls. They say its rules are job killers. A new White House report finds air pollution rules from the EPA cost far more than other government regulations. But they also result in far more benefits than other government mandates.

When it comes to reporting on climate change, European media are from hothouse Venus, and their American counterparts are from considerably more frigid Mars. The divide between them may be having a profound impact on climate and energy policy in either part of the world.

Current climate and energy policy debates in the United States rarely involve historians. If you search the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2007 synthesis report, you will not find the words history or historical. Even so, history pervades climate and energy policy discussions. History guides policy choices, inspires proposals for action, and structures institutional development.